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National Archives Cuts Back On Web Site Archiving

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the i-remember-everything dept.

hhavensteincw writes "The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) is coming under fire for a new policy to stop the "harvesting" of a digital snapshot of all federal agency and Congressional Web sites after every Presidential and Congressional term. NARA, which archived more than 75 million Web sites in 2004 after George Bush's first term ended, will not harvest agency and Congressional Web sites when his current term is over because it says agencies are supposed to be archiving Web content on their own. But NARA has been criticized by some for opting out of preserving these important historical archives on the Web."

2 of 45 comments (clear)

  1. Wrong Time to Quit by Doc+Ruby · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The NARA should not be considering quitting right when the Bush regime is caught red-handed deleting vast amounts of incriminating digital content that it was legally required to archive.

    If anything, NARA should be required to archive even more now, to guard against losing the unique copies at the other ends of official communications and publications. It should upgrade to a policy of redundant archivers keeping separate copies under separate policies, so that a rogue Executive can't flip one switch and toss all the evidence of their actions into the fire.

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  2. Re:interesting in consideration..... by bumburumbi · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Is it possible that nobody is interested in the data? People may not be interested in the data now, but as time passes, it will become more and more important. I am a bit surprised that the National Archives and the Library of Congress collect so little of the American cultural heritage. In Iceland, where I live, the National Library collects everything on the national TLD (is) three times a year, important sites are crawled more frequently. I know that the US web is several orders of magnitude larger than the Icelandic web. One would however assume that the resources available to the NARA and LC are significantly larger than what the Icelandic National Library has to spend on collecting websites. Collecting a subset of the US web every four years should be well within the means of the US government.